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Weird, my Google Translate of realtime camera view works fine with all permissions disabled in Play Services. Can I shit-talk Samsung now? Because I really want to blame them for breaking this shit in their phone.

Interesing, the AR translator seems to be working for me too. The problem comes up when you disable the instant mode or try to use the "pick from gallery" button.

Telephone/SMS is usually used to identify the device through IMEI or SIM or something like that, other apps do it. Contacts is probably to send money to friends or whatever, which should not be a mandatory thing but I guess Google wants that to work?

Having access to any of these just to be able to send a few bytes over NFC is not required or even reasonable. Just like having to explicitly allow Google to store your location and activity history in order to get a damn weather forecast on the homescreen.

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Interesing, the AR translator seems to be working for me too. The problem comes up when you disable the instant mode or try to use the "pick from gallery" button.

Ah ok, that's a moot point then. That functionality works by sending the picture to Google servers anyway (I also get a popup asking if I want Google to remember the pictures I send). Won't work without internet access either. So yeah, whatever, if you do that all your data will belong to Google.

The AR translator actually works offline as long as you have the offline dictionaries, and it's pretty decent as long as you are translating from "X language" to english.

Having access to any of these just to be able to send a few bytes over NFC is not required or even reasonable.

It is required (and should also be a good thing) to be able to identify and authorize the device for the very least, before it can be used to pay for things.

It also runs some tampering checks through SafetyNet https://koz.io/inside-safetynet/ (which aren't terribly hard to pass if you use something like Magisk for your root and advanced functionality, which is what you should be using on your device anyway if you are a power user)

You can read the statement if you try to add a credit card to Google Pay, it tells you that it may/will give that info to the credit card provider or something.

Just like having to explicitly allow Google to store your location and activity history in order to get a damn weather forecast on the homescreen.

Yeah this is stupid, but it is hardly a unique functionality so whatever, disable it and use something less stupid.

Are you okay with this?

If the app is indeed requiring that information to identify the device to function, yes.

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For real? I thought the whole wireless traffic between the phone and the tower is encrypted but didn't check for a long time. To be honest the time I checked was when GSM was the big thing and GSM had optional encryption which was enabled by default (now ofc. you could build your own GSM Tower in your car, let it send with much power and just place your car near the target mobile. The target mobile will connect to the strongest tower - which should be yours - and the tower decides if encryption is used or not. Then your tower connects to the real tower as the target phone and you have an min attack. Now that I think about it this should still work today if you jam more modern frequencies, hence force the target phone to GSM... But that's another story). Or do you mean it's not encrypted after leaving the tower to i.e. NGN networks?

3G/LTE encryption is good but is used only for the wireless signal (i.e. from the phone to the cell tower). If someone goes and wiretaps the actual tower or the network infrastructure they can intercept the message, which is harder than analog wiretap, but still relatively easy and doable. (while if someone wiretaps internet infrastructure and you are using end-to-end encryption they can't eavesdrop a damn thing)

Also, in many networks (in EU at least) the operators move the voice and SMS to GSM frequencies/networks that would be otherwise unused, so they can keep all the 3G/LTE bandwith for internet access.

(now ofc. you could build your own GSM Tower in your car, let it send with much power and just place your car near the target mobile. The target mobile will connect to the strongest tower - which should be yours - and the tower decides if encryption is used or not.

So yeah, by all intents and purposes, voice and SMS are not encrypted, although it's not trivial to wiretap them as it is with analog (where all you need is to physically connect a phone to the same wires)

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More seriously, I have never ever seen any normal person even acknowledge the concept of font changing in Windows in my experience, so I'm still not convinced.

I knew people who were dyslectic and needed the Dyslexie font to be able to read better. So they changed their font on their computers to the Dyslexie font. And I also knew quite a few people who changed the font their Samsung Galaxy's just for fun.
And I have a slight hint of dyslexia as well, so while I don't need the Dyslexie font per se, I would like a more readable font on my Android device. Currently, I cannot do that because I can't root this phone, but my next phone can be rooted and I will for the sake of changing the font.